Polar Vantage V - First Rides & Provisional Look At BETA Accuracy

It's relatively early days yet for me with the new Polar Vantage V and Polar Vantage M. REMEMBER: I have been using late beta hardware. I am also using firmware v0.35 - which is numbered as beta firmware. These are a few charts to give you a flavour of what I've experienced when swimming, biking and running. The charts are absolutely NOT meant to be any kind of review or a statement of the quality of the sensors on the Vantage. That will be a few weeks away AND WILL BE BASED ON RETAIL HARDWARE NOT BETA HARDWARE. MORE INFO: You can find all related posts listed in this tag as I add them https://the5krunner.com/tag/PolarVantage. The optical heart rate looks good, in places, so far. It also throws a few wobblies which is not unexpected at this stage. Here is a maximal test on a trainer with a Garmin HRM-TRI alongside. There was also a Polar OH1 outputting to the Humon Hex app whilst performing a MOXY 515 test - but I have not yet got that data off the Hex. A turbo trainer can be an easy test for oHR as there are few motion artefacts that are produced. However, the Vantage V handled the 175bpm heart rate nicely enough. 175bpm is not far off my cycling HRmax. This was hard on the legs... I then did the following ride which turned out being super slow BUT it was on bumpy ground and that is where the Vantage's new algorithms are claimed to work wonders and hence why I embarked on this particular escapade. As you can see the HR looks fairly good and is certainly usable. But the real true test will be at higher intensities and comparing to a Garmin Elevate. This was my first and only run (limp). The Vantage's HR tracking looks to generally not be quite as good as the Garmin Elevate. The blip at 4:45 was when I was just double-checking that the Vantage was using its oHR rather than the Polar OH1 I had on my other arm. It was. It shouldn't have taken 4 minutes to sort itself out tho. Again this is BETA FIRMWARE/HARDWARE. Finally a short road bike ride with some 'sensible efforts' on a reasonable road surface. I'd say that the Garmin Elevate was just about acceptable here but the Vantage is clearly not and more work needs to be done before it is released in 6ish weeks time. We all love looking at GPS tracks (well I do) and trying to determine if that 50cm deviation here or there is good or not. The Polar Vantage has a low powered Sony GNSS chip that supports GLONASS and GPS. GLONASS and GPS are definitely both enabled and there is no option to turn off GLONASS. Here is a section of a trail ride under moderate tree cover; comparing to the Garmin 935 with GPS-only. The Polar Vantage seems slightly off the track compared to the Garmin and, indeed, did cut a few corners elsewhere on the ride. But these are trivial variations and they have occurred on pre-production hardware - so do not draw any conclusions. The point of showing this is that the GPS track seems at least alright and is not doing anything crazy. I'm assuming that this is exactly the same Sony GPS chip as in the Suunto 9. FWIW the initial GPS tracks from the production models of the Suunto 9 appeared to be NOT as good as the tracks from the Polar Vantage at this stage. Here is another place that I once used to see which watches could correctly put my track on a narrow footbridge. the Polar does very well here - IIRC only the Microsoft Band managed anything better about 4 years ago (probably more luck than GPS-engineering)!! [caption id="attachment_29194" align="aligncenter" width="793"] , Red 935, Green Vantage V[/caption] The Polar also did well cycling down an avenue of 'normal height' trees, below. Much better than the Garmin. Some of you might be arguing that I should have used GLONASS with the Garmin (maybe) but I find GPS-only is generally the best. [caption id="attachment_29195" align="aligncenter" width="837"] , Green Vantage V, Red 935.[/caption] This is on my regular GPS test route which some of you might be familiar with images from. This time I cycled a part of it almost by accident. This particular segment is impossible for GPS because of the long tunnel BUT the Polar handled: the tunnel; the tall buildings leading up to it; and the aftermath, as normality was restored, as well as any other device has. The Garmin 935, below in red, does look bad but it's not too bad...that's how hard this section is for GPS. [caption id="attachment_29196" align="aligncenter" width="1086"] , Green Vantage V, Red 935.[/caption] Staying on the bike, I tend to show this junction regularly on GPS tracks mainly because it is a tight turn on a course where I do multiple laps From two wheels to two feet and here I am running again in Bushy Park. These all look 'alright' but only just...maybe it's a bad satellite day? [caption id="attachment_29244" align="aligncenter" width="731"] Red 235, Green 935, Yellow Vantage[/caption] Further on in the same run the Garmin 935 is still performing well but the Vantage needs to do slightly better. [caption id="attachment_29245" align="aligncenter" width="967"] Red 235, Green 935, Yellow Vantage[/caption] GPS Summary: Just to be clear - I've shown mostly genuinely good GPS segments from the Vantage V, there are a few cut corners here and there and a few deviations here and there. I've not yet come to a view about how the whole GPS picture sits together yet however I know Polar are working with Sony on some improvements that will be implemented over the next month or so. Similarly with the optical HR. It does look pretty awesome at times. But then less so at other times. Again, this is being worked on. MORE INFO: You can find all related posts listed in this tag as I add them https://the5krunner.com/tag/PolarVantage. A Polar Vantage Review will not follow until late October and that will be with a proper production model not this beta unit. Price, Availability & Discount The Polar Vantage M retails at $260/GBP250/Eur280, The Polar Vantage V retails at $499/GBP439/Eur499 The Polar Vantage now has general availability. There do not seem to be widespread discount yet in the EU. I've included the link below but you will find a better deal at New Running Gear and Power Meter City. New Running Gear (NRG), below, were also bundling in GBP50 of running freebies. : Power Meter City (USA) with the coupon code 'the5krunner10' New Running Gear in the EU/UK with the code 'the5krunner10' w [caption id="attachment_29267" align="aligncenter" width="1192"] https://geni.us/PolarVantage to buy in UK/Eu/USA[/caption] [caption id="attachment_25638" align="aligncenter" width="790"] Best REI/Wiggle/PMC price is linked to. Prices could fall below existing level from 2019 onwards £249/$259/Eu279. .[/caption] [caption id="attachment_25638" align="aligncenter" width="790"] Best REI/Wiggle/PMC price is linked to. Prices could fall below existing level from 2019 onwards £439/$499/Eu499. .[/caption]